>most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages:

When did Linode and DO got dropped and not being part of the cloud ?

What used to separate VPS and Cloud was resources at per second billing. Which DO and Linode along with a lot of 2nd tier hosting also offer. They are part of cloud.

Scaling used to be an issue, because buying and installing your hardware or sending it to DC to be installed and ready takes too much time. Dedicated Servers solution weren't big enough at the time. And the highest Core count at the time was 8 core Xeon CPU in 2010. Today we have EPYC Zen 6c at 256 Core and likely double the IPC. Scaling issues that requires a Rack of server can now be done with 1 single server and fit everything inside RAM.

Managed database? PlanetScale or Neon.

A lot of issues for medium to large size project that "Cloud" managed to solve are no longer an issue in 2025. Unless you are top 5-10% of project that requires these sort of flexibilities.

For a lot of people (not me), if it's not from AWS, Azure, GCP or Oracle then it's not cloud, it's just a sparkling hosting provider.

I had someone on this site arguing that Cloudflare isn't a cloud provider...